Saturday, November 26, 2016

For more than a decade, Kris Kobach has been the G.O.P.’s anointed ideas man for hard-line immigration policies. Now he’s advising Donald Trump.

By Jonathan Blitzer, The New YorkerNovember 22, 2016

During Mitt Romney’s campaign for President, in 2012, he claimed that he could solve the political conundrum of immigration reform by getting undocumented immigrants to “self-deport” from the United States en masse. He was roundly mocked for the idea. Why would millions of people voluntarily leave a country they’d long considered home? His suggestion, though, was hardly a flub—it was meant to be a serious threat. For Kris Kobach, the adviser who sold Romney on the concept, the eventuality of widespread self-deportation was entirely feasible. The government simply had to make life so unrelentingly difficult for immigrants that they’d have no other choice.

Kobach, who has been the Kansas secretary of state since 2011, is advising President-elect Donald Trump during the transition, and he appears to be a candidate for a top post in the incoming Administration.[...]

Friday, November 25, 2016

Donald Trump promised to deport two million “criminal illegal immigrants” in his first 100 days in office. Immigrants and their allies are already organizing, protesting, and defending “sanctuary cities.”

David Bacon, American ProspectNovember 22, 2016

The state of Nebraska went red on Election Day, voting for Donald Trump and the Republican ticket, but working-class Omaha, Nebraska's largest city, went blue, voting for Hillary Clinton and the Democrats. Clinton won urban Omaha—Douglas County—by 3,000 votes, but lost the city’s electoral vote. In 2010, redistricting had joined Omaha to the wealthier suburbs of Sarpy County, delivering Trump a 12,000-vote advantage this year. Incumbent Democratic House member Brad Ashford lost his seat to Republican Don Bacon on November 8 for the same reason.

Nevertheless, all 18 precincts of Ward 4 voted against Trump by a two-to-one margin, thanks to years of patient organizing by the immigrant Mexican community of South Omaha. African American North Omaha voted solidly against Trump as well. The Omaha results highlight both the achievements of years of organizing in U.S. immigrant communities, as well as the vulnerability of those same communities under a Trump administration.

“We have built institutions in which immigrants are winning power in the middle of a corporate culture,” says Sergio Sosa, director of Nebraska's Heartland Workers Center. He describes a 20-year history of community and workplace organizing. “We resisted immigration raids in meatpacking plants under the Clinton and Bush administrations, and mounted marches and demonstrations for immigration reform. For eight years, we’ve fought deportations under President Obama, while building a precinct-by-precinct power base.”[...]

Thursday, November 24, 2016

Investors are betting on Trump’s promise to incarcerate and deport millions, and big changes may be coming to America's prison towns, says Carl Takei of the ACLU.

By George Josephy, CityLabNovember 14, 2016

Among the big winners buoyed by Donald Trump’s victory? The private prison industry. Shares of CoreCivic (formerly known as Corrections Corporation of America) and GEO Group, the two biggest players in the business, jumped 43 and 21 percent, respectively, the day after the election.

Over the last week, their fortunes have continued to rise as Trump’s recent public statements affirm his aggressive deportation plans. In an interview broadcast on CBS’ “60 Minutes” Sunday, Trump insisted he would remove two to three million immigrants upon taking office, incarcerating many in the process. “What we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records,” Trump told correspondent Lesley Stahl. “We are getting them out of our country or we are going to incarcerate.”

Wednesday, November 23, 2016

More than 350 faculty members signed a letter Wednesday urging University President Drew G. Faust and other Harvard administrators to protect undocumented students in the wake of Donald Trump’s election as president of the United States.

The letter—published in The Crimson and co-authored by Fine Arts and African and African American Studies Professor Suzanne P. Blier, English Professor Stephen L. Burt ’93, and History and African and African American Studies Professor Walter Johnson—argues that the University has an obligation to protect students to the best of its ability and uphold its stated ideals of diversity.[...]

Tuesday, November 22, 2016

The Obama Administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program has granted reprieves to many undocumented immigrants. The Trump Administration could end the program.

By Francisco Goldman, The New YorkerNovember 19, 2016

In November, 2014, when news stories about Donald Trump, if he was in the news at all, made him seem nothing more than a buffoon, President Obama issued a series of executive actions on immigration. One of them expanded the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or daca, which allowed immigrants brought to the U.S. as children—often referred to as “Dreamers”—to apply for work permits and temporary protection against deportation. dapa, another new program, offered the same assurances to undocumented immigrant parents whose children were U.S. citizens or permanent residents. Some five million immigrants might have benefitted, but the programs were put on hold in May, 2015, by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld an injunction issued by a judge in Texas. After the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, organizations and immigrants remained in a state of suspense.

For the New York Immigration Coalition, prepping immigrants to apply for daca or dapa was a priority, both before and after the injunction. One afternoon in the spring of 2015, while the Supreme Court was still undecided as to the fate of the executive orders, I dropped by Junior High School 162, in Bushwick, where Betsy Plum, the director of special projects at the Immigration Coalition, and some of her young colleagues, along with other immigration attorneys, activists, and representatives from foreign consulates, had organized a day of outreach to the local immigrant community. That morning, Plum told me, the line had stretched down the sidewalk.[...]

After 9/11 in 2001 almost the entire nation was living in fear and anger. They were looking for Bin Ladin but they couldn’t find him so they directed their anger at the Mexican immigrant. Only a few days before 9/11 immigration activists were preparing to go the Washington DC to celebrate the passage of a reform law. After 9/11 that legislation died in the Congress. Democrats and Republicans were joined at the hip, intent on driving immigrants from the nation.

We didn’t give up then – and we shouldn‘t give up now. We brought our families before the nation. We testified in local city councils, county board, state legislatures and before the U.S. Congress. We talked with the unions and the churches. We organized ourselves – and we marched with millions of Latinos – both with and without papers. In Chicago we began the sanctuary movement again. We mobilized and elected President Obama on the promise of immigration reform in the first 100 days.

When President Obama broke his promise we marched and rallied again – until right before his second election the President gave us DACA for the Dreamers.[...]

Sunday, November 20, 2016

BUFFALO — Immigration enforcement agents were supposed to be targeting the restaurant owner. But Antonio Ramos Salazar, a cook, was the one with guns pointed at his head.

One morning last month the officers burst through the back door at La Divina, a no-frills Mexican market and taco counter in suburban Buffalo, capping a two-year investigation into the labor practices of the restaurant’s owner, Sergio Mucino. According to the authorities, Mr. Mucino, 42, a legal permanent resident from Mexico City, along with two associates, had been harboring undocumented workers in homes around Buffalo, transporting them to jobs at his restaurants and paying them off the books.

Mr. Mucino was arrested at his home on Oct. 18. But two dozen of his workers were swept up in simultaneous raids that morning at all four of his restaurants.[...]

Saturday, November 19, 2016

The Department of Homeland Security temporarily suspended the deportation program on 12 October but started again on 3 November

By Rachael Revesz, The IndependentNovember 9, 2016

The US is about to begin amping up its program to deport Haitians shortly after a cholera outbreak and Hurricane Matthew ravaged the country.

The Department of Homeland Security has scheduled two flights per week to deport around 60 people back to Haiti every seven days.

The deportation program was temporarily suspended on 12 October while one of the poorest countries in the world was dealing with the immediate after effect of Hurricane Matthew, which killed more than 1,000 people and put thousands of pregnant women at risk, wiping out hospitals, infrastructure, crops and livestock.[...]

Wednesday, November 16, 2016

The Workers’ Project in Indiana has been uniting undocumented immigrants with white union workers since long before Trump hit the campaign trail.

By Sarah Jaffe, The NationNovember 4, 2016

﻿Ten years ago, before Donald Trump made anti-immigrant scapegoating into popular politics, a group of organizers in Fort Wayne, Indiana, were trying to figure out how to bridge the divide between white workers and undocumented Latino workers.

Indiana University–Purdue University Fort Wayne (IPFW) had hired a construction company that used some union labor and some non-union, undocumented workers to helm an expansion project. The unions involved reached out for help to the Workers’ Project, at the time an initiative of the Northeast Indiana Central Labor Council (CLC), to represent workers who weren’t formally members of the council’s member unions. The unions had planned a campaign under the banner of “Local Jobs for Local People,” but Workers’ Project co-founders Tom Lewandowski, at the time president of the CLC, and Mike Lauer, director of the Indiana/Kentucky/Ohio Regional Council of Carpenters, argued against this framing—it would contribute to xenophobia, to us-against-them thinking. Instead, Lewandowski says, “Our operational theme for this campaign was going to be, ‘If they’re getting fucked, we’re getting fucked.’”[...]

Tuesday, November 15, 2016

(CNN)After President-elect Donald Trump's election win, and amid fears of heightened bigotry and hate crimes, a Brooklyn woman has set up an online form where citizens can volunteer to accompany vulnerable commuters who are worried about being harassed on their way to school or work.

Kayla Santosuosso, the deputy director of the Arab American Association of New York, created the online signup sheet on Thursday evening, after being contacted about a Muslim woman in Harlem who, in the two days since the election, had twice been harassed and threatened on her train journey to college.

"I got a direct message from someone in my network asking me if I knew somebody who could help accompany her," Santosuosso said.

"She had notified the police but she was still facing the prospect of having to go to school in the morning on her own and she was scared."

Santosuosso immediately wrote a public Facebook post to see if anyone was available to help.[...]

Monday, November 14, 2016

To deport as many immigrants as he wants to, he’s going to have to scoop up a lot of people who aren’t criminals at all.

By Dara Lind, VoxNovember 14, 2016

If you take President-elect Donald Trump at his word, according to what he told 60 Minutes’ Lesley Stahl in his first interview since the election, the overwhelming majority of unauthorized immigrants in the US have nothing to fear from his administration.

“What we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records, gang members, drug dealers,” he told Stahl. Most unauthorized immigrants don’t have criminal records. If the Trump administration actually limited its deportation efforts to convicted criminals, it would be more lenient than the Obama administration has ever been.

The problem is that the president-elect doesn’t understand that. He told Stahl that there are “probably 2 million, it could even be 3 million” unauthorized immigrants with criminal records in the US — and that he wanted to deport all of them.

The Trump administration isn’t going to be able to deport 2 or 3 million “criminal illegal immigrants,” because there simply aren’t that many people who fit the description.[...]

Friday, November 11, 2016

Donald Trump’s aggressive anti-immigrant rhetoric throughout his campaign has caused anxiety and fear within Latino families in Florida who fear they’ll be torn apart.

Leticia Miranda, BuzzFeed NewsNovember 10, 2016

HOMESTEAD, Florida — Maria Perez has not found the right words to soothe her 12-year-old son’s fear of what will become of their family with Donald Trump as president.

“He thinks, ‘Why does Donald Trump want to get rid of all immigrants?’” she told BuzzFeed News. “‘What does that mean?’”

Perez, a 30-year old undocumented Guatemalan immigrant, believes Trump has fueled a war against immigrants throughout his presidential campaign which has only stoked fear in the community and her children.

“People can kill you,” said Perez, who left Guatemala in 2003 because of the country’s widespread violence and limited jobs. “Why? Because of the example of Donald Trump. That’s how I feel because now they can can look at you and see you are an immigrant and kill you.”

One of Trump’s most effective campaign promises was to crack down on illegal immigration and build up President Obama’s deportation strategy. But through the campaign that plan was drowned out by Trump’s calls to have Mexico pay for a wall along the border and his describing of immigrants as “criminals” and “rapists.”[...]

Thursday, November 10, 2016

Tragically, Donald J. Trump is the president-elect of the United States of America.1 As we watched state after state turn red, we could not escape the realization that the country was taking a sharp turn for the worst.

To be clear, we’re under attack and we're scared for our families and loved ones. And we know we must resist, and change the culture that allowed Trump to rise to power.

The stakes have never been higher. We have work to do and we need to be powerful enough to organize and refuse to support Trump’s regime and its heinous agenda.

Our nation faces one of the greatest threats we’ve ever known. Trump represents a clear and present danger for our communities that must be confronted urgently. If left unchecked, Trump will continue to create a hostile and dangerous environment for all immigrants, Muslims, Latinxs, Asians, Native Americans, women and Black Americans—an environment which will result in tragedy.

For those building a movement for social justice, the real question is not what went wrong in the election, but what do we do now? In the face of a government that will force deportations, engage in rabid sexism, cultivate overt appeals to white nationalism and enforce brutal crackdowns on protesters, we have a duty and responsibility to act, to build, and to resist hate, fear, and violence. Planning, discussions, and details will come soon, in the meantime, we will not share your information.

Sunday, November 6, 2016

Twice on Sunday, Donald Trump told audiences at rallies that electing Hillary Clinton risked a truly spectacular shift in the composition of the United States.

"When you're working for Hillary, she wants to let people just pour in. You could have 650 million people pour in and we do nothing about it," Trump said. "Think of it. That's what could happen. You triple the size of our country in a week."

Well, no. For a lot of reasons.

Before we get into the important question of the mechanics of having 650 million people roll up to enter the United States, an exercise that will hopefully make clear just how hyperbolic this particular schmear of hyperbole happens to be, let's stop and consider the comment. Donald Trump uses hyperbole the way some politicians use touching voter anecdotes — to reinforce a broader political point. He says completely outrageous and completely untrue things because he feels as though they bolster his broader point: Immigrants are risky. Is it true? Not the point. The point is oh no, immigrants.[...]

Saturday, November 5, 2016

WASHINGTON — Melania Trump was paid for 10 modeling jobs in the United States worth $20,056 that occurred in the seven weeks before she had legal permission to work in the country, according to detailed accounting ledgers, contracts and related documents from 20 years ago provided to The Associated Press.

The details of Mrs. Trump's early paid modeling work in the U.S. emerged in the final days of a bitter presidential campaign in which her husband, Donald Trump, has taken a hard line on immigration laws and those who violate them. Trump has proposed broader use of the government's E-verify system allowing employers to check whether job applicants are authorized to work. He has noted that federal law prohibits illegally paying immigrants.
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Mrs. Trump, who received a green card in March 2001 and became a U.S. citizen in 2006, has always maintained that she arrived in the country legally and never violated the terms of her immigration status. During the presidential campaign, she has cited her story to defend her husband's hard line on immigration.[...]

Friday, November 4, 2016

A group of 20 immigration rights activists spent the night in Hillary Clinton's Pittsburgh campaign office

By Ben Norton, SalonNovember 4, 2016

A group of 20 migrant justice activists occupied Hillary Clinton’s campaign office in Pittsburgh on Thursday night, demanding that the Democratic presidential nominee call for an end to record-breaking deportations and raids.

The activists, who call themselves #Buffalo25, brought sleeping bags and spent the night in the office. A spokesperson told Salon on Friday morning that they are still occupying the office.

#Buffalo25 is a campaign created by the immigrant rights group Movimiento Cosecha in order to bring national attention to recent ICE raids in Buffalo, New York.[...]

About The Politics of Immigration

The Politics of Immigration: Questions and Answers is a book that goes beyond soundbites to tackle concerns about immigration in straightforward language and an accessible question-and-answer format. For immigrants and supporters, the book is a useful tool to confront stereotypes and disinformation. For those who are undecided about immigration, it lays out the facts and clear reasoning they need to develop an informed opinion. Ideal for classroom use, the updated and expanded 2017 edition provides a succinct overview of U.S. immigration history, policy, and practice, with detailed notes guiding readers toward further exploration.
Guskin and Wilson have written extensively on immigration and facilitated dozens of dialogues on the topic with students, community activists, congregations, and other public audiences. To arrange a dialogue or for more information, contact them at thepoliticsofimmigration@gmail.com.
To stay in the loop on author events and related resources, follow the book on Twitter (@Immigration_QA) and Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/ImmigrationQA/).